Class and Victorian Poetics

Abstract

In this essay, I consider three aspects of recent studies of working-class class poetry: the tasks and rewards of its recovery, the complexities of critical attempts to interpret "non-canonical" verse, and wider insights which have emerged from efforts to integrate such attempts into more traditional studies of nineteenth-century literature. Recovery has been necessary because most working-class poets could only hope to publish their work in broadside or periodical form, and few of their works have been reprinted. Accidents of preservation have further foreshortened our understanding of the range of working-class poetry, which extended from Thomas Cooper's dignified epic verse to Isobel Chisholm's gypsy "curses" and Mary McPherson's Gaelic incantations. Interpretative studies of the range just mentioned have benefited from willingness to consider unfamiliar rhetorical models; search out historical antecedents of "simple" appeals to direct emotion; and admit that there might be more to poetry than has been dreamt of in our received interpretations and well-worn critical commonplaces. Finally, integration of an appreciation of working-class poetry into studies of Victorian literature reveals that much of the history of mid-century poetry -

Dialect, Victorian Poetry, and the Voices of Print

“…Viewed more positively, it is an innovation that facilitates Hamilton's political expression, and so is fundamental to the contrast her writing presents with familiar critical impressions of working-class women's poetry of the period, too often "brushed aside as apolitical and sentimental versification." 82 Her compound language, in short, again requires us to see textuality as inherent and not artificial to the genre of dialect poetry. Rather than an abandonment of the duty to embody ways of speech, the stylization of orality undertaken by Hamilton and other poets was a fertile creative act undertaken within the conditions of print culture, and capable of being adapted to multiple forms of identity and affiliation.…”